1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to server technologies and more specifically to debugging of business flows deployed in productions servers.
2. Related Art
Servers refer to computer systems which receive requests from various client systems, and provide corresponding responses by processing each request based on a corresponding processing logic. A server that is presently deployed in a production environment and actively processing service requests is termed as a production server. Production servers are contrasted from testing and staging servers, which are used in testing and evaluation environments respectively.
The processing logic in production servers is often specified in the form of business flows. A business flow contains activities, which are specified at a high level of abstraction compared to programming languages such as C, C++, Java, etc. (lower level languages). In an embodiment, the high level activities are converted to lower level instructions (e.g., in Java language) and then executed by a flow engine. The flow engine is shared by many flows, and thus provides the runtime environment to process each activity of a flow, as is well known in the relevant arts.
Such environments are thus conducive to high level business people (e.g., analysts as compared to programmers) to specify the desired processing logic, without having to address many of the lower level implementation details.
There is a general need to facilitate debugging of such business flows deployed in production servers. As is well known, debugging refers to providing additional visibility into various internal states during execution such that a user may determine a cause of a problem. Thus, debugging with respect to business flows is generally required when a problem is deemed to be present with respect to the processing logic underlying the business flows. Various aspects of the present invention provide such a feature, as described below in detail with examples.
In the drawings, like reference numbers generally indicate identical, functionally similar, and/or structurally similar elements. The drawing in which an element first appears is indicated by the leftmost digit(s) in the corresponding reference number.